Red Sox a different animal than Yankees when it comes to team-building

Seldom has the gap between the Red Sox and Yankees seemed so wide.

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By
Tim Britton
Posted Feb. 21, 2014 @ 2:16 pm

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Seldom has the gap between the Red Sox and Yankees seemed so wide.

This isn’t a statement about talent or about expected results in 2014. Rather, it’s a comment on the philosophical differences that have emerged between the two old rivals in how to construct a winning baseball team.

Take, for instance, Chris Capuano.

Signed Thursday, Capuano was headed to Fort Myers Friday with an eye toward officially reporting to Red Sox camp on Saturday.

The addition of Capuano, despite the presence of a number of promising young arms on the cusp of major-league readiness, highlights Boston’s approach to team building. Depth was a consistent refrain in 2013, and it remains a watchword as the Sox aim to repeat.

In Capuano, the Red Sox see an undervalued performer. Over the past three seasons, the left-hander compiled a 4.15 ERA over 490 innings with the Mets and Dodgers. He’s shown himself to be a durable starter that can produce at a level slightly below league average — a level that nonetheless retains value.

What really opened Boston’s eyes, though, was Capuano’s performance out of the bullpen late in Los Angeles’ year. Capuano made three relief appearances for the Dodgers in September and October, tossing five combined innings in which he allowed two hits and three walks. He struck out six.

Furthermore, Capuano has always showcased an ability to get left-handers out. He’s held them to a .231 average and .288 on-base percentage over his career, with slightly better numbers than that each of the past three seasons.

The Red Sox, thus, view Capuano as both a depth starter and, more readily, an intriguing bullpen piece. His ceiling as a starter probably isn’t as high as the one for a healthy Ryan Dempster in 2014, but Capuano portends to be a bigger bullpen figure than Dempster ever would have been for Boston this year.

As such, he probably represents a better fit to the current roster at a much cheaper salary than Dempster.

Bargain-hunting for this kind of depth has become a staple of the quote-unquote new Red Sox, the rejuvenated version of the Olde Towne Team that was born the day the Sox traded a trio of high-paid stars to Los Angeles. Last year, it was signing Koji Uehara and trading for Mike Carp. This winter, it’s taking a chance on Grady Sizemore and a pitcher like Capuano.

It only serves to highlight the growing philosophical differences between the Red Sox and their chief rivals in the Bronx — a chasm team president Larry Lucchino was happy to discuss on Friday.

“We’re very different animals; I’m proud of that difference,” Lucchino said. “I always cringe when people lump us together. They are still, this year at least, relying heavily on their inimitable old-fashioned Yankees style of high-priced, long-term free agents. And I can’t say that I wish them well, but I think that we’ve taken a different approach.”

New York has of course added Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, Carlos Beltran and Masahiro Tanaka to long-term and/or big-money deals this winter. The quartet will rake in $438 million over the next seven years, and that doesn’t include the $20 million posting fee for Tanaka or the $5 million buyout on Ellsbury’s 2021 option.

On the surface, it appears to be a quick-fix strategy with the potential to pay dividends in the short term. New York did, after all, win the World Series in 2009 after bringing in CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Mark Teixeira in free agency. However, it’s also the approach that left the Yankees with a startling lack of depth last season, when the Yankees’ aging core was beset with injuries. Signing Ellsbury not only means New York loses its first-round pick in this June’s draft, but also that it handed a compensatory pick to Boston.

(Even this year, the Yankees start the season with Brian Roberts and Kelly Johnson penciled in as everyday starters.)

“If you compare what we did last year in the offseason to what they did this year, there’s quite a contrast there,” Lucchino said.

Lucchino countered the notion that the Red Sox would avoid the path of high-priced free agents for good, saying there is a time and place for that kind of spending. He just thinks the situation has to be unique.

“We do keep open the prospect of signing a long-term deal with a free agent paying a sizable amount of money to attract a star in his prime. We haven’t ruled that out,” he said. “There’s just a rebuttable presumption against doing that. But you can rebut it. The circumstances can allow for you to go ahead and do it.

“The Yankees do it more often; it seems to me that they do it more often as a matter of course. And for us, it would be more the exception than the rule.”

Ellsbury, for instance, did not stand out as an exception.

“Sometimes you have to say goodbye to people you’d like to keep,” said Lucchino. “The proposal they made to him was obviously very appealing.”